This weekend I served as a bilingual Mandarin and English moderator at a Saturday night "Literary Evening" at the International PEN Asia and Pacific Regional Conference. I had the honor to introduce several renowned poets and authors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, most of whom read selections from their works. Several have suffered politically for their art. Chinese poet Yang Lian is living in exile. Ko Un was sentenced to 20 years in jail for treason in South Korea due to his involvement in the South Korean democracy movement. The outspoken playwright Sha Yexin, who has had his own political ups and downs, delivered an edgy speech about the state of Chinese literature, focused on problems of book banning and censorship.
On Sunday, I was on a panel about Internet publishing in China. Two of the panelists were prevented by the mainland Chinese authorities from traveling to Hong Kong to attend the conference. Another panelist, spy novelist Yang Hengjun, described how his spy novel is read by mainland Chinese audiences mainly on the Internet because spy novels aren't approved subject matter as far as the Chinese authorities are concerned. An author from Taiwan described how the Internet is flourishing in Taiwan as a place for young up-and-coming authors - but alas, most of their blogs and websites can't be read by people in mainland China.
On Saturday night the Czech poet Jiří Gruša, who spent time in prison and in exile during the bad old days before becoming a government minister and ambassador after the iron curtain fell down, summed up why censorship is so damaging to a society when he said:
"We must see the opinions of others in order to express our own opinions."
Internet censorship in China and at least 40 other countries (according to the Open Net Initiative) is making that difficult, despite early hopes that the Internet would bring down borders. A movement of "hacktivists" is working hard to defeat that censorship with technology. You can get to know one of those people, Prof Ron Diebert of the Citizen Lab, by listening to the audio of a talk he gave last week at the Berkman Center. Ethan Zuckerman blogged the talk in detail here. In his work with the ONI, Ron says he has watched as more and more countries have gotten more sophisticated at walling off their corners of the internet, filtering content so that people can't see certain websites without using special circumvention tools and techniques. The result is what Ron describes as an "arms race in cyberspace."
I myself have joined that arms race as a board member of Tor, a nonprofit organization that is developing and refining a toolset which, in a nutshell, works as a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor then helps prevent websites you visit from tracking you, and enables you to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, and other such places online when they are blocked by local Internet providers. You use Tor by downloading a bit of software called a "client" which then sends your request for data connection not directly to the website you're trying to access, but instead routes it circuitously and randomly through several other computer servers located around the world. This makes it impossible for the people at the endpoint to know where you are coming from, and obscures the websites you are visiting from your local internet service provider. It is a safer option than using public proxy servers - another favorite way of circumventing Internet blocking - though neither Tor nor any other tool is 100% foolproof for somebody who absolutely must at all costs avoid detection. For more about how Tor works click here. Here is a very useful post by Ethan about Tor and what it can and can't do. Also see Ethan's excellent guide: Anonymous Blogging with Wordpress and Tor.
One of the newest additions to the arms race is Psiphon, which Ron Diebert is spearheading. According to the project's own website, Psiphon is "human rights software...that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor." It works very differently than Tor. A person in a non-censored country has to set up a "Psiphon node" and give access to his or her friends and family members in censored countries. It does not obscure the identity of the people accessing the node, so if you're accessing a Psiphon node you need to have a high level of trust in the person running it. Also if you're running a node, you're giving people access to your internet connection in a manner that requires a great deal of trust: if they start uploading or downloading child porn on your node, or use it to distribute pirated movies and music, you could be in trouble yoruself. So this is good only for people living in censored countries who have close trusted friends and family members living overseas - people who also trust them. If you do have such a relationship with somebody, Psiphon is a great tool. Diebert pointed out there may be some very interesting commercial applications of the technology as well, particularly for companies as an alternative for VPN's. I should think news organizations with correspondents in censored countries could and should set up Psiphon nodes for their reporters. I recommend reading Ethan's post on Ron's talk in full, but here is his conclusion:
I’m a huge fan of Psiphon, but I’m a bit worried about the attention Psiphon’s currently getting. Some of the reporting has been pretty superficial and has given the impression that Psiphon solves every problem for someone in a filtered nation. This isn’t true - Psiphon’s a great solution for people with a trusted confederate outside their home country. But it’s not a solution for anonymity, and it doesn’t solve problems well - yet - for people who don’t have an out of country confederate.
For those purposes, Tor is probably a better solution. But Tor has its problems as well - Mike Hull argues that Psiphon is much faster than Tor (which makes sense, as Tor adds overhead to each request by routing through multiple computers), easier to use (perhaps, since it doesn’t require the end user to install it) and safer for the end users (as they don’t have incriminating software on their machines). I’d argue that Psiphon and Tor are appealing to different sets of users with different needs, and that there’s a neat split between the two… what’s going to be difficult is articulating to the general public which tool is useful for which purposes, and convincing people that using public proxies is a bad idea when they could use Tor or Psiphon.
Which brings me to a poem by Korea's Ko Un published in The Nation last year:
Get yourself a friend
come to know a foe
Get yourself a foe
come to know a friend
What kind of game is this?
